Fev: In My Own Words

by Brendan Fevola

  In round 2, I kicked another six goals when we fell just short against Fremantle in Perth. Suddenly, everyone was off my back. For once, the Herald Sun was swamped by letters praising me. One reader wrote:

  It’s great to finally see Brendan Fevola playing committed footy. To watch him chasing, tackling and attacking the ball with such ferocity is so heartening to all us Carlton supporters. After enduring years of dummy spits and appalling body language, it appears that the penny has finally dropped. Keep up the good work Brendan.

  We played in a number of close games in those early rounds, but wins were what counted, and after copping a hiding from Collingwood in round 6 we found ourselves second-last on the ladder. Fearing that our season was already heading down the drain, Stephen Kernahan extended an olive branch from the board to the players. A couple of days before we played Essendon in round 7, he delivered a passionate and emotional speech about how much he loved the club. And the longer Sticks spoke, the more inspired we felt. He told us that he completely understood how tough it had been at Carlton in the last couple of years, which was a very important thing for him to say on behalf of the club’s administration. Then, at the end of his speech, Sticks told us how much he hated Essendon. ‘Let’s stick it up them,’ he bellowed. We all roared our approval.

  Game day began well when I found out that my usual Essendon opponent, Dustin Fletcher, had pulled out of the match. And it got even better when I jogged to the goal square and was greeted by some kid I had never seen before. He turned out to be Joel Reynolds, the grandson of Essendon legend and three-time Brownlow medallist Dick Reynolds. The young fella had a great blood line, but he was in his fifth season with the Bombers and had played only thirty games. Also, he seemed half my size—I was 3 centimetres taller and 19 kilograms heavier than him. To Joel’s credit, he tried to talk himself up a bit as we stood there waiting for the opening bounce. But nonetheless, the Bombers supporters were adamant that Kevin Sheedy had finally lost his marbles, and with good reason. I kicked three goals early in the second quarter, another in the third, then booted three crucial goals in the last quarter, which snuffed out any hope the Bombers had of coming back. We won by 33 points, in the process sending our bitter rival to the bottom of the ladder.

  14 May 2006: Celebrating a goal during the Essendon v Carlton AFL match at the MCG. (Newspix/Colleen Petch)

  We celebrated that win like we’d won the flag. It was brilliant. We nearly lifted the roof off the change rooms as we belted out the club song. Sticks was in the circle with us, and he certainly deserved to be. It was a big win for Denis as well, and he walked around and thanked us all as we did our warm-down. He was delighted that I had shown him respect by turning my form around. That’s what Denis loved about me. He knew that I had a huge amount of respect for him and what he was trying to do at the club.

  As a team, we had few moments of joy after that. We lost eight matches in a row, a bad run that didn’t end until round 16 when we fronted up against the Bombers again and held them to a draw. In fact, the only other win we had for the year was a 7-point victory over Melbourne in round 18. But from a personal perspective, the season was a triumph. I kicked five goals or more in nine games, which was a fair effort when you consider we were consistently getting belted. When we copped yet another hammering from St Kilda in round 8, I booted nearly our entire score: 4.5 out of a total of 4.10. And I bagged six goals and was declared best-on-ground when we almost caused the upset of the season against ladder leader West Coast at Subiaco Oval in round 11. I later received three Brownlow Medal votes for my effort that day. The other great thing to come out of that game was the performance of our number-one draft pick, Marc Murphy, who collected twenty-seven possessions despite having to do battle with superstars Chris Judd and Ben Cousins.

  My life took a brief turn for the worse when I broke my finger at training in mid-July, but it took a turn for the better a few days later—to be exact, it was 1 pm on Friday 21 July—when Alex gave birth to a baby girl, whom we named Leni Jay. We were to have that massive round 16 game against Essendon the following day and Alex told me that I should play. When I arrived at the MCG, all the boys queued to congratulate me. I was pumped. I really wanted to put on a show for my newly enlarged family. The boys kept asking me what sort of goal celebration I had up my sleeve, but I just told them to stay tuned. Early in the first quarter I took a mark and went back for a set shot. As the kick sailed through for a goal, I made a cradle with my arms and started rocking them back and forth, grinning from ear to ear. The crowd loved it, as did my teammates, who all ran over and high-fived me. I ended up booting five goals that day, and we snatched a draw after Eddie Betts weaved some magic in the last couple of minutes of the game. Although I had sworn off alcohol for the season, I had to go out that night to wet the baby’s head. Because I had been so quiet all year, the boys erupted when I rocked up at the pub, and I loved that. We had a huge crack at it. I think I shouted just about everyone I met a drink that night.

  I stayed on the straight and narrow for the rest of the season, and I managed to have a couple more big days out on the field. The best of them was when we played Hawthorn at the MCG in round 19. That day had something for everyone. The Hawks put my former Dandenong Stingrays teammate Trent Croad on me at full-back, and he frustrated me so much that by midway through the first quarter I was sitting on the bench, having copped a spray from Denis. But from the second quarter onwards, I was on fire. By half-time I’d kicked four goals, including a cracking soccer goal, after which I ran up to the Hawthorn cheer squad and waved four fingers at them. I did my best to keep us in the game by kicking another four in the second half, making it eight for the match, but we fell 23 points short.

  Suddenly, I was receiving praise from all sorts of people. Mr Cleanskin himself, Essendon full-forward Matthew Lloyd, whom we used to call the ‘Velvet Sledgehammer’, told Herald Sun reporter Jon Ralph that ‘Brendan has been what Carlton can hang their hat on this year, just with how consistent he has been in his performance. He has rarely played a bad game, which has been great for him’.

  We lost our last three matches, which ensured that we collected our third wooden spoon in five years, but with eighty-four goals to my name, I managed to win the Coleman Medal, the award for the AFL’s leading goal kicker during the home-and-away season. It was the first time a player in a wooden spoon side had won the Coleman since Hawthorn’s John Peck in 1965. While I wished I was playing in a team that was headed for the finals, I was nonetheless very proud of having kicked so many goals in a side that was rooted to the foot of the ladder. Looking back on it, I think it was a pretty fair achievement. Our game plan was so simple that all the defenders in the league knew where the ball was going, which meant I had blokes dropping in front of me all year. Then again, I had good supply. Blokes like Nick Stevens and Ryan Houlihan hit me lace-out with the Sherrin plenty of times, so they deserve plenty of credit as well.

  I received the Coleman Medal at a gala function that was headlined by the announcement of the All Australian team, in which I was named at full-forward. It was yet more reward for a season in which I had worked seriously hard. A couple of weeks later I finished second in Carlton’s best-and-fairest, ten votes behind Lance Whitnall. Mum and Dad both came along that night and they had huge smiles on their faces when I accepted my runner-up trophy. They were delighted that everything was working out so well for me.

  Unfortunately, while I was celebrating my achievements, things were going from bad to worse inside Carlton. The friction within the club had worsened considerably for several reasons. One was that Denis Pagan and Barry Mitchell, the coach of our VFL affiliate, the Northern Bullants, had become embroiled in a nasty clash of personalities during their three years together at the club. Their relationship had broken down so badly that Barry had spent the 2006 season sitting in an office on the opposite side of Princes Park from where the rest of the coaches were based. It was a ridiculous situation, one that illustrated how dysfunctional t
he club had become during those years at the bottom of the ladder.

  In addition, back in August, Kouta and fellow senior players Nick Stevens, Lance Whitnall and Matthew Lappin had organised a meeting with club president Graham Smorgon, Stephen Kernahan and chief executive Michael Malouf. During the meeting, which took place on Smorgon’s luxury boat in the middle of Port Phillip Bay, the four players lobbied for the board to sack Denis. I was part of the player leadership group at the time, but the others hadn’t invited me along because they knew I was a supporter of Denis. Kouta detailed the meeting in his autobiography:

  We sailed out from New Quay in Melbourne’s Docklands and canvassed our views with a fair degree of apprehension. As players, we were really afraid that if Denis got wind of the meeting he’d trade us, which he’d done in his first year when he offloaded certain blokes for complaining about him.

  We prepared a written submission designed to back up our argument that Denis should no longer be in control. Graham questioned the performances of the players, and we may have had a bit to answer for in that area.

  It’s fair to say that this meeting almost led to Denis Pagan’s dismissal. But nothing came of it, at least not straightaway.

  Details of the meeting eventually leaked out to the newspapers. I thought the way the boys had tried to get Denis sacked was wrong, but I never said much to them about it. Besides, I was pretty confident that Denis would keep his job, and so was he. After all, he still had two years to run on his contract. I didn’t believe that Carlton had enough money to pay him out. And that was exactly how it turned out in the end.

  Throughout the whole saga, Denis just soldiered on, maintaining his positive attitude. I respected him enormously for that approach. He was genuinely trying his guts out to make the club better, and he didn’t deserve to have people sniping at him from inside the club as well as outside it. I hoped that Denis would soon lead us back up the ladder and force his critics to eat humble pie.

  Because I was considered the success story of Carlton’s tumultuous season, and in light of the expectation that Kouta would step down from the captaincy due to his battles with injuries, my name began cropping up in talks about potential new skippers, as did Lance Whitnall’s. I was really keen to be the captain as I thought I had the ability to bring everyone together again, and ensure that the knifing of Denis behind his back came to an end. I talked about my optimistic mindset in an interview with the Herald Sun’s Mark Robinson:

  I’m loving life at the moment. There’s not much I would change. There’s nothing at all that annoys me. It’s a good place to be. Everything’s really good and the off-field stuff is going well. And I’d be an idiot if I went back to who I was and blew it all.

  In truth, however, things were not so rosy. In fact, my life was already unravelling, and alcohol was playing a big part in that. I was proud that I had largely steered away from drinking during the season, but alcohol is a pressure-release valve, and I needed to release a great deal of pressure. I loved little Leni to bits, but the stress associated with fatherhood had been weighing me down. I was struggling to adapt to having a new baby in the house. So I broke my drinking drought on Mad Monday and from there I went crazy, staying away from home for days on end. Alex became really angry and soon our relationship began to break down. Amid all that chaos, I started an affair with someone. Out of respect for my family and my kids, I don’t want to talk about the situation in any detail. It’s already been well documented. I already disrespected them once and I don’t want to do it again. Let’s just say that I was young and dumb and I made a big mistake.

  I really needed to get away for a while, so I was disappointed when I was initially overlooked for a place in the Australian team to play two International Rules Tests in Ireland in October. But my mood brightened when, a week before the team was due to fly out, St Kilda star Nick Riewoldt pulled out of the tour due to some niggling injuries. I was thrilled when the chairman of selectors, former Melbourne and Sydney Swans star Gerard Healy, told me I was in. Despite our troubles, Alex congratulated me on being selected to play for Australia. Given the grief I had caused her, I thought it was amazing that she still treated me with respect. Full credit to her. She wanted us to remain a close family unit for the sake of Mia and Leni.

  After touching down in Dublin, the International Rules team was shepherded onto a bus which took us to the town of Killarney, where we did some training with the round ball and drank a copious amount of Guinness. Our chaperone/team manager, former Hawthorn wingman Robert ‘Dipper’ DiPierdomenico, led from the front when it came to the off-field shenanigans. From Killarney, we headed to Galway, on Ireland’s west coast, where the first Test took place. I didn’t play in that game, which we won on a cold Saturday night, but I was pretty certain that I would get a run in the second game back in Dublin.

  On the day after the first Test, the boys decided they wanted to have a team-bonding gathering at the Galway horse races. The team’s management supported the idea as they had given us all the day off to do whatever we wanted. I hadn’t planned on going to the races that day. I was actually in the hotel lift, going back up to my room after breakfast, when Dipper said to me, ‘C’mon mate, everyone else is going.’ If right there and then I’d said ‘No’, everything would have been fine. But instead, I relented. ‘OK mate,’ I said to Dipper. ‘I’ll come along.’

  Most of the players ended up going to the races, as did our coach, Kevin Sheedy, and a number of the team officials. The AFL’s chief executive, Andrew Demetriou, was there as well. On the way to the racetrack, Dipper grabbed the microphone on the bus and ordered everyone to put 20 euros into a quaddie. Soon after we arrived at the track, we all gave the big fella some money, then we headed to a bar at the top of the grandstand. We had our first beer at around 1 pm and drank pretty steadily from then on. One of our team officials got a couple of tips and when they both saluted, we all went berserk. It was great fun. Later in the afternoon, Dipper’s quaddie got up as well. That made it a brilliant day all round.

  By the time we left the races, we were all pretty drunk. Most of us wanted to go out on the town and keep drinking, so we headed off to check out the pubs and bars that Galway is famous for. It was a public holiday the next day, which meant the town was rocking. A small group of us went to the Imperial Hotel, and it was five minutes of stupidity in that pub that turned a great day into a nightmare.

  I was pretty chirpy by the time we arrived at the Imperial, and I soon started giving the barman some grief. I thought it was all pretty harmless, but he responded by refusing to serve me any more drinks. I was a bit pissed off with his attitude, so I walked over to him and put him in a headlock. I didn’t want to hurt the guy. I just thought he was being a bit of a smart-arse and I wanted to make him pipe down. It was, however, a very stupid thing to do. Barry Hall, West Coast Eagles backman Adam Selwood and Matthew Lappin tried to drag me away, but it was too late—a girl who was also working behind the bar had called the cops. At 11.30 pm, I was marched back into our team hotel by the police, which was pretty embarrassing. The whole thing was captured on one of the Imperial’s security cameras, and by the time I woke up the next morning, a reporter by the name of Dylan Howard, who was covering the tour for Channel 7, was at the pub trying to buy the vision. By that night he had secured a copy of it, apparently after handing over $2000, and then it was all over the news back in Australia.

  I soon had to face a power-packed panel of interrogators. Demetriou was there, as was the AFL’s football operations manager, Adrian Anderson. They were backed up by the chief executive of the AFL Players’ Association, Brendon Gale, our captain, Dustin Fletcher, and Sheeds, our legendary coach. I owned up to drinking too much and apologised for my actions, but they decided that I needed to be punished. I was devastated when it was announced that I was being sent home. I felt shattered that I wasn’t going to play for Australia. But it was my own fault. It was yet another example of alcohol being my best friend then turning into my wors
t enemy.

  Late that afternoon, I boarded the first bus headed for Dublin, from where I would fly back to Melbourne. But as the bus was meandering across Ireland, I decided to ring my former teammate Simon Fletcher, who at the time was living in the Norwegian capital, Oslo. ‘Shit has gone down and I’m coming over there,’ I told him. When I arrived at Dublin Airport, I got a call from a Channel 9 news producer, who said the network wanted to do an exclusive interview with me to get my side of the story. I agreed after they offered to pay for my flight to Oslo and arranged to meet them there. I arrived in Norway at about 1 am, and as I stepped off the plane in my T-shirt, all the other passengers were laughing at me. I realised why when we had to walk across the tarmac to get to the airport building—it was bloody freezing. The Channel 9 crew met me near the baggage carousel and drove me to a plush hotel for the interview, during which I said that I regretted my actions. Fletch picked me up when it was done and we had a bloody good couple of days in Norway.

  Although the Irish police had decided not to charge me with assault, I had to go back to Galway and sign some papers at the police station. By the time I landed back in Dublin, where I was picked up by some security bloke, the boys were just about to run out onto Croke Park for the second Test. Just thinking about that made me angry. I should have been with them, but instead I was in the shit. The 200-kilometre drive to Galway took ten hours, thanks to a flat tyre (we finished the journey in a cab), and there I was issued with an adult caution notice, which was something that had been brought in by the Irish police to deal with troublesome local youths. I returned by train to Dublin, and after avoiding Australian news crews as best I could, I booked a flight to London so I could meet up with a half-dozen of the International Rules boys once the series was finished. When I finally saw them, they were pumped, as they’d won the second Test and wrapped up the series in front of a massive crowd. They felt pretty bad about what had happened to me, but we soon tucked into a few beers and forgot about it. After touring London the following day, and seeing all those awesome sights, I wanted to stay there rather than come back to Melbourne and face the music. But I knew I had to come home.